British Columbia’s (BC) primary care system is actively moving to team-based care. Team-based care can increase capacity, attachment, and access; provide more person-centred care; and improve health outcomes. With funding and support from the Ministry of Health, we developed and conducted a team-based primary care evaluation.
The evaluation aimed to understand the impacts of the transition to team-based primary care in BC, for both patients and healthcare teams, and to explore perceived changes across the following dimensions and aspects of the TEAM Framework.
- Patient experience
- Provider experience
- Team function
- Capacity and access
- Attachment
Evaluation Design
The evaluation was conducted in two rounds (Figure 1), with up to 15 clinics/health centres participating in each round. A range of clinic and health centre types (e.g. CHCs, UPCCs, small private clinics), geographic locations, team compositions and types of professionals, in both rural and urban settings were recruited.
Evaluation Data
The evaluation used three data collection tools (Figure 2):
Patient Survey
Participating clinics/health centres invited patients to complete a survey to assess aspects of patient experience including patient perceptions of access, person-centred care, and team function.
Team Survey
All clinic/health centre team members (healthcare providers and staff) were invited to complete an online survey to assess provider/staff experience and team function.
Clinic Report
An online clinic report was completed by each clinic/health centre to gather data including types of providers and staff, attachment numbers, access, and team capacity.
Data from each clinic/health centre was summarized and shared with clinic/health centre teams to inform changes and quality improvement work. Anonymized data from each round was combined into a provincial summary and shared with leadership and decision makers.
Learn More
In June 2025 we presented the some learnings and reflections from Round 1 of the project for the TBC@UBC Network. Below is a recording of the presentation.